Tranny fix and Motor Mount

We discovered in my last post I could not change gears after fixing the input shaft bearing on the transmission. A couple weeks ago I loosened the three detent bolts which hold ball bearings against the shift shafts. It turns out I had tightened these bolts too much and could not budge the shifter. Once loose, I could freely shift into any gear. I tightened them back up to 16 ft/lbs per the manual and all is good. Tested the motor/tranny and everything seemed fine until the last couple times I spun up the motor, I heard a high pitch cyclical noise which sounded like something just barely rubbing somewhere. Oh no, not again.

Took the motor out again and spun it up. All is good. Hooked up a drill to the transmission shaft and it spun nicely. No Noise, so it must be in the coupling or the motor mount tweaking the motor a bit. Put the motor back in and held it there with a jack and all was good, so the thought is the motor mount. The mount was a two piece circular mount that goes around the motor and is held together with a couple large bolts and nuts. It is then attached to the existing rubber motor mount with a bracket my friend James made from 1" angle iron. The fit was never perfect, but I didn't think it would cause a problem. It had a bit of an angle that did not match the circular mount on the motor, so when the big bolts were tightened down, I think the motor alignment was tweaked a bit.

I decided to make a new mount and checked out some other CRX builds online. One guy used an L-shaped bracket that came off his garage door, and he just bolted it to the end of his motor and welded the other end to some metal that attached to the rubber motor mount. So I thought, that sounds pretty simple. I have some extra 1" angle iron and my neighbor can weld, so maybe I can do something simple with the angle iron.

Long story short, it works beautifully. One piece bolted to the motor, one piece running vertically up to the last piece attached horizontally to the rubber motor mount. It took us a bit to get the angles and lengths of each piece right, but it looks great and works well. We added a couple more pieces of straight metal to stiffen the whole structure and it is in the process of being painted. One more coat and I will install it in the car. I hope to take a photo of it this weekend and also take a shot of it installed in the car. It is lighter than the previous piece and is out of the way of some of my other components.

After it is installed, I will test the motor and tranny for a bit and make sure all the gears run well and the motor is spinning freely with no noises. I may then put the control board back in and take the car on the road to check it out. I still have to adjust the controller back to the original settings so as not to jerk the transmission around with the last settings I had in there. On the other hand, I may hold off on that and work on setting up the power vacuum brake system. We'll see how I feel. I think testing the car on the road is more exciting and may draw my attention more than wiring and hoses on the brake system.